IMAGINATION IN POWER
Imagination in power was perhaps the most famous slogan of the French May; and, in the years that followed, perhaps also the most derided. A foolishness worthy of the similarly famous definition given by De Gaulle of joli mai, the chienlit, a farce. But that “imagination in power” was not just a provocative slogan, it was the formula that most precisely defined the experience of those days, the state of mind of the many who participated in the “insurrection”. In the climax of May, power had practically disappeared, it seemed to have dissolved, even if, in reality, it had only been provisionally dislodged from its usual seat. Something had filled this void, something had replaced the power and fully occupied the physical and symbolical space of Paris. This something, that it would have been difficult to assimilate in a new power, because of its fluid, spontaneous, unpredictable characters, could also have been defined “imagination”. It was a question of the occupation of public space in which everything could and had to be experimented. A total desecration had attacked institutions, culture, habits. And therefore everything could be “imagined” again. Imagination in power indicated that time that lies between a “never again” and a “not yet”, without suspecting that soon it would have been closed into a parenthesis. A dimension of the “possible” that had however materially invaded and occupied the scene of the real and that started an extraordinary mass creativity, in languages, in forms of communication, in an anomalous everyday life, invented and lived day by day. From the Atelier populaire installed in the École des Beaux Arts, an extraordinary laboratory in which more than a thousand people worked for over a month, to the free court of the occupied Odeon. The “imagination in power” did not therefore designate a delirious government programme, but a password that aimed radically at the actual forms of politics, including those of opposition, which were then one of the main targets of the 1968 movement. In this sense it was not just a flag of the joli mai, but a critical trend and a need for creative innovation that traversed, with more or less appreciable results, the protest movements in various countries.

INTEGRATION OF THE WORKING CLASS
While in the vision of classic Marxism the working class was a social subject situated in a “naturally” antagonistic position with respect to capital, and the only one that could demolish the capitalist regime to allow a different society to be born, this certainty cannot be shared, at a general level, by the student and youth movements of 1968. In a way that is quite influenced by the different national situations, therefore, the movements wonder which is the function that the working class can carry out in relation to their radical criticism of the existing society: is it still the main revolutionary subject, with respect to which the students can carry out a function of stimulus or intellectual avant-garde, or has it been by now irremediably integrated into the system? The theory of the integration of the working class, which would have definitely lost its critical and revolutionary potential is authoritatively sustained by Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher of the School of Frankfurt, who remained teaching in the United States. In the present situation of capitalism, Marcuse maintains, for example in the conferences that he pronounces in July 1967 at the Free university of West Berlin, it is no longer possible to identify a class that, because of its position, is in some way predestined to carry out the role of driving force of the revolutionary process. If Marx identified the revolutionary class in the proletariat, Marcuse claims, this was motivated also by the fact that he saw in it the totally dispossessed class and, precisely for this reason, free also from the false ideological representations that adorn the bourgeois world. In the meantime, however, this otherness has completely disappeared, the proletarian class has been included and integrated; today the individual worker does not express needs that differ from those that are found in the other levels of society. The existing order is not upset, Marcuse maintains however, unless we start first of all from the statement of the new needs, radically different from those that the capitalist society produces and encourages and thanks to which it continuously reasserts the approval that the governed assure to the dominant social relations.
The bearers of new radical needs, incompatible with the “principle of performance” that dominates in the bourgeois society, are not therefore the workers, but rather those like the young rebels, the hippies, the beatniks, in which the refusal to participate in the benefits of the opulent society is expressed, as is the criticism of the models of consumption and life that it proposes. But the theory of the integration of the working class does not belong only to the line of thinking of Marcuse, and indeed, it is to be found also, even if in completely different terms, in the “Third World” tendencies, that look at the “damned of the earth” of the poor and colonized countries as the only force able to seriously challenge the world capitalist order. Taking up again a subject that Lenin had already placed in his book on imperialism, it is maintained that the working class of the capitalist metropolises also enjoys to a certain extent the benefits that derive from imperial dominion and therefore it has no real interest to take sides against it. The real class struggle is therefore, in this perspective, that which contrasts the rich metropolises against the exploited suburbs of the world, it is the struggle of the “country” against the “city”. The theories of integration of the working class are affirmed within the contexts in which these seemed an evident truth, as for example in the United States or in Federal Germany, while they were never really accepted in European countries such as France or Italy, where indeed the economic boom of the 1960s was accompanied by a strong and radical recovery of workers' antagonism.

HERBERT MARCUSE
The importance of Herbert Marcuse for the culture of the 1968 movement, at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America, was very great. Widely read and discussed in his country of origin and in that of election (Germany and the United States), Marcuse was also voraciously and immediately translated in Italy and France. His most important books, from Eros and civilization to One dimension man to Criticism of tolerance, for a certain period acted like a flag, that every student of the movement was proud to show and carry with him. But what use did the students really make of this philosopher of the very particular biography: he had first studied with Heidegger, then he had collaborated with Horkheimer and Adorno, and finally, when the Frankfurt leaders had returned to Germany, he had continued to work in America, teaching in the University of California? To understand him we can begin by remembering a very important episode: the encounter-debate between Marcuse and the students that was held in July 1967 in West Berlin, organized by the protest committee of the Free University. The idea from which Marcuse took his cue on that occasion was that of the “end of utopia”. But don't misunderstand it: end of utopia does not mean that we must abandon utopias to convert to realism, but quite the opposite: what might have appeared until yesterday as utopian, dream and excessive hope even for socialism of Marxist inspiration, is now, says Marcuse, a possibility that is quite tangible and achievable, realistic at least in the sense that it is not prevented by any insurmountable objective element. In the society of opulence and automation, Marcuse maintains, not only is the cancellation of poverty and misery within our grasp, but also the abolition of forced work, and with it all the avoidable forms of social and instinctual repression.
If there are difficulties, and even large ones, as Marcuse never tires of reminding his impatient students, it is not on this ground that they must be sought but on that, which in fact becomes central, of subjectivity: Marcuse's second theory, which will in fact be discussed more extensively, is that the presence of the wider objective possibilities of liberation is matched by the absence of subjective forces capable of grasping these possibilities and translating them into practice. The working class, which in the Marxist view should have been the bearing structure of social transformation, is now, at least in the countries of advanced capitalism, solidly integrated into the system: thanks above all to the diffusion of consumer goods and the manipulative powers of the means of mass communication. By now these constitute an irreprehensible ideological structure, that assures the most effective support to the authoritarian democracy of late capitalism. Certainly, Marcuse never tires of insisting on the fact that it would be a grave error to confuse this with fascism: the “repressive tolerance” of late capitalism has much “softer” ways and permits a much more comfortable life, even if it manages just as well to prevent the formation of a public opinion that is autonomous and of political organization of authentic opposition. Therefore, according to Marcuse, even behind the democratic-liberal forms, a power structure is hidden that is as always unassailable, sustained not only by the traditional apparatuses of repressive-police dominion, but also and above all by the new instruments of manipulation.
Marcuse maintains however that the new forms of dominion can therefore only be countered by an opposition of a completely new type: it has its point of strength on the one hand in the exploited masses of the Third World (which are today the real proletariat) and on the other in the rising (but minority) potentials of refusal and antagonism that are beginning to develop even in the metropolises. The opposition here will certainly not be born from the working class or from the middle classes that occupy the central part of the social pyramid; rather it will develop on its edges, and that is among the student and intellectual elite or, on the opposite extreme, among the most poor and marginalized groups of the urban sub-proletariat. But the role of the young people and students is essential, because they are the bearers of new radical needs, strongly characterized in an instinctual, erotic and aesthetic sense, that appear incompatible with a society dominated by the “principle of service”. It is precisely thanks to the emergence of these radical needs that we can begin to advance liberation politics of a new type, projected towards a realist utopia, that is inspired more by Fourier and his “loving world” than by old Marx. The great interest of the student movements for Marcuse started to diminish fairly rapidly however. When the philosopher returned to Berlin in April 1968 he was still welcomed, in the crowded Great Hall, by students singing the Internationale, but the revolutionary hope was now nourished by different contributions (Leninism, Maoism, all the varieties of heterodox Marxism) and therefore it ended up no longer needing the old man from Frankfurt. In France and Italy the movement fully involved even the working class, so that the theoretical Marcuse of integration appeared clamorously confuted by the facts and the search for theoretical reference points turned elsewhere.

MAOISM
In the student marches, assemblies and demonstrations of 1968, the name of Mao was one of those that resounded most frequently, even in the somewhat surreal trinity “Marx-Mao-Marcuse”, which for a sort time did effectively stand out on the banners and wall writings. But what did the students, and even the European intellectuals (from La Cina è vicina by Bellocchio to La Chinoise by Godard) find in the China of President Mao? Many things, and certainly many that were contradictory. For the small Marxist-Leninist parties that were formed above all in Italy, Germany and France, Maoism acted as a sort of very popularist and very integralist myth, like the paradigm and “holy picture” of a world that was an alternative to the bourgeois world, the bearer of a sort of original purity, that the revolutionaries of the West had to conquer, even through a job of almost religious self-criticism (key word of the Maoist groups) and renovatio of oneself. This Maoism of the very caricatural aspects was that in the “dream” of which groups such as the Italian “Union of the Marxist Lenininsts” lived, while their flag showed the motto “serve the people”.
There were however other aspects of the Maoist experience that attracted the more intellectually advanced points of the movement. First of all, Mao was seen as the revolutionary leader that had attempted, in a country of peasants, a plan of development that was considerably different to that followed, with enormous costs, by the Soviets: no to the primacy of heavy industry, no to forced collectivization in agriculture. But, above all, the Mao beloved of the movements was that of the Cultural Revolution: the Mao of the slogan “bomb the headquarters!”, of the opposition from below against all the hierarchical powers in the party and in society, of the attack without pity on bureaucratic incrustations, and therefore also on the privileges and powers based on (presumed or real) specialisms. One of the aspects of Maoism that was liked best by the movement was precisely the criticism of the neutrality of knowledge and of specialism, which were in agreement with similar reflections that had matured on the more advanced ground of the West.
Anti-institutional and anti-party criticism, which is one of the key points of the Cultural Revolution, obviously also had a less pleasant aspect, which however the movement tended basically not to see: the direct relation, without mediations, between the masses and the leader, with all the sanctification which inevitably derived from it. Oleographic portraits of Mao, waving the “little red book” abounded, as did collections of quotations from the works of the President who acted both as the flag and summa of wisdom, traced on the model of the most ancient masters of oriental knowledge.
In 1968, while the young people of Europe were looking with passion and participation on Mao and his unprecedented revolution, in China the revolution of the Red Guards was coming to an end. It was subsequently criticized and finally even demonized, until the terrible image that has been given of it to world-wide audiences by the most recent Chinese cinema (one of the best things, moreover, which has emerged from Chinese culture in recent years). An age of a great libertarian drive or rather dark times, characterized by a real obscuring of reason? Historians will judge; the 1968 movement, at the time, could not have had the vaguest idea.

PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
“Personal is political” is a slogan of 1968 that survived for a long time in the post '68 culture. It means that there are no personal or private spaces which are neutral or independent from the conflicts and powers that clash in society. In the 1968 view, everything is determined by the system, which is not so much the system of production, as the system of the hierarchies, from the State to partial institutions such as the family and the school, as far as the total institutions such as hospitals or prisons. But precisely because the logic of the system is omnipervasive, likewise its opposite is also so: every statement of the person who protests his manipulation or his use for reasons of the transmission and defence of established roles is itself political, it already has a value of opposition and antagonism. The I is unshakeable, compressed and repressed politicalness. Political therefore is, in the first place, the parents-children conflict within the family: the stakes in the clash with the parental figures is the introjection of the social roles that the parents demand to inculcate in their children, in their dress, in their manners, in their sexuality, in their language and even more in the choices that regard their future. Political therefore is not just the sphere that this concept had traditionally defined: political is also the space of the interpersonal relations that individuals try to arrange in a different way to that which the system would like to impose on them. Indeed, the real novelty of 1968 perhaps lies right here: in the awareness of the fact that there is no collective, that is to say political, liberation, unless together with a process of self-emancipation of the individual, which begins from the places and relations that have been traditionally considered as private and personal. “Personal is political”, therefore, is a password that is hurled against those manners of interpersonal relations in which the rebel generation of 1968 no longer recognizes itself. But at the same time it also marks the risk of a sort of total, integral politicization, one that was finally even somewhat obsessive, in every area of experience: with the fall of the separateness of politics, it is found in every detail, in every, even hidden, aspect of the life of the individual. When the tide will turn, this total politicization will be the first thing to be made into a caricature: even for making love, there is a right-wing way and a left-wing way. In subsequent years, it will be feminism that will relaunch the rebellion charge contained in this 1968 password, but in a completely different social and theoretical context: that of the sexual difference that questioned the sexually undifferentiated universality of the political.